Connecting a HDMI laptop/computer to a DVI monitor

Most of my “HDMI-DVI” adapters are female HDMI to male DVI. They’re intended to convert a DVI port on a PC to a HDMI port, allowing you to connect your HDMI monitor to “DVI” on the PC. However, what I wanted to do was a little bit backwards.

I wanted to connect a HDMI laptop/computer (common output, nowadays) to a monitor without HDMI, but with DVI. I knew that with a standard $1 male-male HDMI cable, I could connect the computer to the adapter. However, the other end of the adapter has pins for DVI-I dual link, but the monitor’s female end shows DVI-D dual link.

I looked at the pins on Wikipedia and deemed the side pins a bit unnecessary (“don’t care”), as they were for analog communication. I pulled the 4 square pins (C1-C5), but the plug still wouldn’t fit. I realized that the flat connector (C5) was a bit longer on the converter than the DVI cable I was using; I saw that it was analog as well, and pulled it out. and then it worked! I was able to hack my $2 HDMI-DVI adapter to work not as intended, given a few minutes of research and understanding. Of course, one could buy the correct converter from Monoprice, but shipping costs tend to be too much for one item, and sometimes you need a hack in the moment, instead of waiting a few days for shipping.

A year ago, I understood DVI-D vs DVI-I on video cards and how the DVI connector on video cards supported extra pins for analog input, and could be used with VGA monitors given a cheap, passive DVI-VGA converter found with every video card nowadays. Now I understand it just a bit more.

Why I can’t use WebOS

I’ve used it for 2 years since obtaining my Palm Pre. In general, there is not too much available on WebOS compared to Android, and development to fix that is very slow.

I moved to an Android phone 7 months ago after being fed up with the lack of Google Voice integration, and Sprint ironically released their integration with Google Voice a month later. I also recently obtained a TouchPad since it was $100, even though I did not need a tablet whatsoever (I’m a phone + netbook + desktop kinda guy; no tablets or laptops.)

My list was scrambled not too long ago, so it’s probably missing things, but without further ado..

TouchPad severe:

• Maps – Bing…
• No camera app WTF!
• No GPS (TouchPad only), so no navigation

WebOS severe:

• No real input method support
• No widgets
• No polished Twitter app; a few have existed here and there but no outstanding ones
• No application handlers!
• Email – replies are made with a weird font, makes me not want to use it altogether
• The obvious – limited app selection. I’m sick of no Google Voice, no Google Reader, no VNC client, weak terminal/ssh clients, etc.

TouchPad mehs:

• Kinda slow at stock 1.2GHz, fine with 1.5 UberKernel
• YouTube is not native. They want you to just use the YouTube webpage, which isn’t exactly bad, but isn’t good at all. You try to do desktop-style mouseover to fullscreen or change volume, and it doesn’t work well on the TouchPad. Also, videos have trouble playing at higher resolutions.

WebOS mehs:

• No last.fm scrobbler. Must use music player with integrated scrobbling

WebOS awesome:

• Card view
• Best developer community yet worst app selection
• Homebrew FTW (also FTL, we live in an era where everything should just work)

Since it’s 2011, everyone expects their technology to just work, and for some reason they all think that you should never have to wait for anything. While this is a somewhat reasonable expectation, they shouldn’t be surprised when it doesn’t perform “like a Mac” or “like an iPad”… that is, a device that can’t really do anything, but does it (fairly) well.